As seen in a flashback to the 1960s in the episode "Mother Simpson", Brockman was known as Kenny Brockelstein early in his career. Brockman has a daughter, Brittany, who may have been the product of his fling with the Channel 6 weather girl.

In "Dog of Death", Brockman won the multimillion-dollar ($130 million) state lottery jackpot and left the news desk while still on the air. However, he remained a news anchor because he was under contract, though he also admitted that he likes making $500,000 a year. He has an ongoing feud with traffic reporter Arnie Pye, and has been shown to criticize Pye's reporting and also even chuckles when it was thought Pye had died in a helicopter accident. When Arnie Pye took Brockman's anchor position he admitted on the air he made out with Brockman's daughter but was sure to note it was with "the grown up one" thus revealing Brockman having an adult daughter.

Brockman's penchant for using offensive language works against him in the 400th episode, "You Kent Always Say What You Want", where, after Homer accidentally spills coffee on Brockman's crotch, he shouts what Ned Flanders calls a "super swear" that shocked everyone who watched it. Brockman was demoted to weather man due to the station paying a fine to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and was soon fired when the network executives deliberately mistook a ring of Splenda in Brockman's coffee for cocaine. Brockman was later given his job back to silence him (after doing an exposé that was seen on YouTube uncovering the real reason the FCC is cracking down on obscenity in the media), with a 50% raise, making his new salary $750,000 a year.

Brockman is responsible for popularizing the snowclone "I, for one, welcome our new [fill-in-the-blank] overlords", sometimes used to express mock submission, usually for the purpose of humor.[8] It has been used in the media, such as New Scientist magazine,[9] the Houston Chronicle[10] and Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!: The Watson Challenge (versus Watson).[11][12] Brockman's harangue about the Corvair spacecraft being taken over by a master race of giant space ants in "Deep Space Homer", which generated the meme, is considered to be one of the show's classic moments. The spacecraft was carrying an ant colony to see if they could be trained to sort tiny screws in space, but were released by Homer by accident. This led to an ant drifting by the video feed, appearing gigantic due to its proximity to the camera, at which point Brockman contemplates if the "master race of giant space ants ... will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them" and eventually utters the line "And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords". Author Chris Turner called it "perhaps his finest hour as a journalist"[13] and said that it is "simply among the finest comedic moments in the history of television."[14] On May 6, 2014, Stephen Colbert made direct reference to the phrase by using it as his closing line.